The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  But I was unable to sleep. I was trying to work out what to do. Could I seek help from Lewis? No. He adored Nicky, hated me and was enough of a misogynist to decide the whole incident was my fault. And perhaps it was. Maybe I had led Nicky on by finding him so sexy. After all, there he was, the devout priest. If he’d overstepped the mark, I must have driven him to do so. I’d asked for sex, Nicky had reminded me, begged for it … I shuddered and shivered for some time. In the end I went to the basin in the corner of the room for fear I was going to vomit again, but nothing came up. I turned on the hot tap and tried the water. The immersion heater had been working overtime after my bath and the water was warm once more. Shedding my dressing-gown I began to wash myself over and over again.

  As I did so I wondered if I might seek help from Nicky’s spiritual director, but I supposed that she would be as pro-Nicky as Lewis was, and anyway I’d never been keen on nuns. She’d probably say it was all my fault for wanting a divorce—and perhaps it was. I’d asked for sex, begged for it … Nicky himself had acted only with the very best of intentions … His sole aim had been to heal my debased state of mind which was making us both so unhappy …

  I began to cry. I washed and I washed and I washed and I wept and I wept and I wept, yet still I felt filthy, guilty and degraded. My sister would no doubt have said I was being a wimp and should brace up, soldier on and stop whingeing. “So you and Nicky had a sex-orgy,” I could imagine her saying robustly. “God, you’re damn lucky! What the hell are you complaining about?” And I’d never be able to explain. I could never explain to Susie or Tiggy either. They wouldn’t understand. My marital problems were always so bizarre, so outside the range of normal people’s experience. Only Francie, as I had told myself earlier, would be capable of understanding. Not only was she so familiar with Nicky, but she was a trained listener who dealt regularly with people impaled on what Nicky called “the cutting edge of reality.” I thought: Francie may not know exactly what I should do next but at least she’ll empathise and sympathise. And with relief I remembered that our lunch-date at Fortnum’s was less than twelve hours away.

  I crawled back under the duvet as the clock of St. Benet’s chimed two. I wanted to sneak out to the kitchen and finish off the plonk, but I was too afraid to unlock the door in case Nicky was there.

  By four o’clock, exhausted but still sleepless, I knew that hell was nothing like the pictures painted by Hieronymus Bosch. Hell was living in fear of a wonder worker who was running amok—and hell was being crucified by the dread that this apparently endless stream of soul-destroying abuse was no one’s fault but one’s own.

  III

  I stayed in my room until eight o’clock when I knew Nicky would be at the Communion service. Then I dressed quickly and wrote him a note which read: “I’ve gone shopping and will grab some lunch in the West End. Back for dinner—let’s eat with the others this time. I’m sorry about last night but please don’t let’s refer to it again. R.”

  I had no idea whether I would be back for dinner or not but at least I would have a few hours free of the fear that he might be pursuing me. I was now in such a state that all I wanted was to reach Fortnum’s and talk to Francie.

  Having left the note on the hall table of the flat I fled from the house. Up Egg Street I skimmed and along London Wall to Aldersgate where I headed for the Barbican tube station. I was walking so fast that I felt hot in my winter coat, but so relieved was I to have escaped from the Rectory that I never once slackened my pace.

  Five minutes later a train was carrying me out of the City into the heart of the West End.

  IV

  I had thought I might spend the morning buying Christmas presents for the boys, a demanding task which would divert me from the horrors I had experienced, but I soon found that any demanding task was quite beyond me; I wound up drinking coffee in the mezzanine restaurant at Fortnum’s and looking at the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. I was unable to read but I spent ages examining the pictures on the front pages. After a long, long time the Fortnum’s clock chimed noon and I trailed upstairs to the St. James’s Restaurant to have a scotch while I waited for Francie to arrive.

  I never normally drank scotch in the middle of the day and in fact I never drank scotch at all unless there was a crisis going on, but I felt I had to have something strong to calm me down so that Francie wouldn’t think I’d freaked out. I didn’t want to appear a complete broken reed. I could afford to appear troubled, but I had to give the impression of being in overall control of myself. Supposing Francie were to think I was having a nervous breakdown? With a shudder I hid behind the Telegraph but fortunately the scotch proved a most effective tranquilliser, so effective that I ordered another to ensure I stayed encased in an air of normality. By the time my glass was empty again I was no longer cowering behind the Telegraph but flaunting the Mail while silently chanting my favourite American mantra: “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

  Summoning the waitress I told her to remove the empty glass and bring me a Perrier on ice with lemon. Image was all. Straightening my back I crossed one leg over the other, adjusted the cuffs of my blouse and was just elegantly sipping my Perrier when Francie surged in.

  She was wearing a scarlet jacket, a pencil-thin black skirt, and a black blouse with frills which bounced merrily over her lapels. She was just the teeniest bit fat for a size fourteen but too thin for a size sixteen, so this presented her with a tricky fashion problem to solve, but apart from one or two straining seams she looked smart and her make-up was excellent. When we kissed I held my breath to control the scotch fumes but she let a sliver of air escape and I realised to my surprise that it was ginny. So Francie, like me, had been tanking up! But of course she was depressed at present, poor thing, and had probably needed a discreet g-and-t to oil her path out of Islington.

  Having solemnly decided not to have a drink before lunch, we teetered off into the main part of the restaurant to take our seats at the table.

  Francie was magnificent. As soon as I started to tell her what had happened, she rose to the occasion, shed her normal air of scatty housewife and became the trained listener, oozing warmth and concern from every pore. Effortlessly she contrived to give the impression that I was the most important person in her life at that moment and that she was wholly dedicated to my welfare. Normally a chatty, bouncy soul she became faultlessly attentive, only murmuring encouraging monosyllables or helpful phrases at exactly the right moment. Once or twice the mask of the Befriender did slip and I saw she was beside herself with prurient curiosity, but I found I could forgive her because I knew she was only being human. We all like to be titillated occasionally and it was only natural for Francie to be riveted by a story about Nicky’s sex-life, just as it was only natural for her to derive an almost-but-not-quite-concealed thrill from hearing about a marriage on the rocks. We all like to look down our noses at people who wallow in schadenfreude, but who hasn’t succumbed at some time to having a similar wallow? At least Francie battled valiantly to keep her more disreputable feelings to herself and never for one moment ceased her heroic task of oozing warmth and concern from every pore.

  “Ros darling,” she said earnestly at last after I had completed my story and was busy draining my glass of Chablis Premier Cru, “you shouldn’t blame yourself for anything. What Nick did was totally wrong.”

  I was enormously grateful to her for saying this. Yet at the same time I was terrified that she was saying it only out of a desire to be kind. “But surely,” I said, “if the hypnosis uncovered my true feelings, and if I then egged him on, he’s justified in saying—” I broke off as my voice started to waver. Disaster! I was on the brink of losing control. In panic I groped for the bottle in the ice-bucket, but Francie, anticipating my every need with a brilliant display of empathy, was already refilling my glass.

  “My dear,” she said firmly, “what the hypnosis did was suspend your will. So the ‘true feelings’ which were then uncovered were actual
ly his feelings which he was imposing on you when you had no mind of your own.” Hastily she added: “Of course Befrienders aren’t supposed to offer opinions or advice, but since I’m here in a nonprofessional capacity—”

  “Oh yes, yes, yes, never mind all that, I’m just desperate to know what you really think!”

  “I think what he did was completely unethical and I’m horrified that he’s brainwashed you into thinking you led him on. Ros, before he turned on the hypnosis, you didn’t want to sleep with him, did you?”

  “Absolutely not. I told him so.”

  “So what he actually did was to—”

  “He took away my power to say no,” I said slowly. “He had sex with me without my consent. If I’d been compos mentis—”

  “—you’d never have agreed to it, let alone encouraged him. Right. And when a man has sex with a woman without her consent, that’s—”

  “No, don’t say it, I don’t want to hear, I can’t bear to think he could ever do something so—” I broke off, overwhelmed by tears. “Don’t look at me,” I muttered in panic as I groped in my handbag for a tissue. “You’re not seeing this, I forbid you to see it.” And finally I whispered: “I think I’d rather believe it was all my fault than believe Nicky could ever treat me like that.”

  Francie passed me a Kleenex. The Befrienders were famous for never being without a supply. “Nevertheless,” she said firmly, “it’s terribly important for your sake that you don’t assume a guilt that doesn’t belong to you, so let me take a moment just to spell out what seems to have happened. I think Nick took advantage of all that ancient kindergarten affection which exists quite separately from the marriage and used it to lull you into a false sense of security. Then he switched on the hypnosis, and once he did that you wouldn’t have been responsible for anything that happened. You’d have lost all power to control the scene.”

  I recognised the nightmare scenario, and although I remained physically battered, mentally shattered and emotionally annihilated I was finally able to exonerate myself from blame.

  “He’s very skilled at hypnosis, you know,” Francie was saying. “Val told me once that he can put a willing subject under in a flash with no trouble at all. You might have taken longer, because you were fundamentally hostile, but once he’d neutralised the hostility by resurrecting those childish memories and regressing you into the past—”

  “Yes. That’s how it was. I can see it all now.” By this time I found I was admiring Francie’s skill not just in listening but in understanding the situation and handling my distress. In the past I’d always found her warm-hearted but a bit thick. Now I saw I had underestimated her. As a St. Benet’s Befriender her gift of empathy was given full rein so that every ounce of her intelligence was maximised, and this made me realise how much even ordinary people could achieve when they took up work to which they were perfectly suited. I thought how clever it had been of Nicky to spot her potential and recruit her to work at the Centre.

  The thought of Nicky brought fresh tears to my eyes and forced me to destroy another Kleenex. How could the Nicky who was my lifelong friend and most trusted companion have treated me like that? I felt as if I had never known him; I felt as if he had destroyed the past; I felt that all my most precious memories had been brutalised until they appeared to be no more than a string of illusions. Yet alongside my cherished memories were the memories of the parlour-tricks. I’d always known he was capable of misusing his gifts, but it was one thing to hypnotise willing girls at a party and quite another to—

  “How could he have done it?” I cried in despair. “How could he have brought himself to do something so—” but I could not bring myself to say any of the words which were no longer fashionable. No one bandied around words like “wicked” and “evil” and “corrupt” any more unless they were Bible-bashing bigots or those Islamic fundamentalists who had just protested about the latest Rushdie novel. The liberalism of the sixties had destroyed our moral vocabulary, and Mrs. Thatcher had so far been too busy stoking the fires of nationalism and capitalism to reinvent it.

  “Funnily enough,” Francie was saying, as if trying to lower the emotional temperature of the conversation by staging a temporary retreat into casual chit-chat, “there was a case like this in the papers only the other day. Various women were hypnotised by their therapist who then used them for sex sessions. They were aware of what was going on but they couldn’t resist, and it was only after they came out of the hypnosis that they realised exactly what he’d done.”

  Faintly I said: “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, he was jailed, of course, but he was obviously just a run-of-the-mill wonder worker.”

  I tried to speak but nothing happened.

  “Nick’s quite different,” said Francie rapidly, “because he’s basically a devout priest. He’s just gone temporarily crazy because of your decision to leave him.”

  “So it’s all my fault after all!”

  “No, no, no, I didn’t mean that—” Francie, realising she’d put her foot in it, frantically tried to backtrack, but I was already rejecting another guilt-trip; I had finally seen the situation in the round. With a strength that surprised me I said: “Then isn’t the truth just this: that although we all under stress can do dreadful things, we always have the choice whether to do those dreadful things or not? And if we do make the evil choice and behave bestially, shouldn’t we face up afterwards to what we’ve done and try to make amends to our victims? Nicky said sorry but he didn’t mean it,” I said, voice shaking, and suddenly anger was shoving aside my despair. “He was just going through the motions of apologising! If he’d really been sorry, he’d have taken full responsibility for what he’d done instead of telling me that I’d asked for it!”

  “Oh, but that’s classic behaviour,” said Francie at once, bending over backwards now to support me. “Men guilty of that particular act often take that line. They’re in denial.”

  The anger made me feel better, gave me the strength to pull myself together. I decided it was time to repair my appearance, but when I opened my compact I saw to my dismay that my state of disrepair was worse than I’d imagined. My supposedly waterproof mascara had smudged. With my shiny nose, damp cheeks, chewed lipstick and panda-like eyes I resembled a sixty-year-old clown.

  “Shall I order a brandy?” said Francie resourcefully, seeing I was on the verge of collapse again.

  “No, it’s no good using alcohol as a crutch,” I said with bravado, but then I spoilt this show of courage by dissolving into tears again. “Oh Francie,” I wept in utter despair, “I’m so totally wrecked! What on earth am I going to do?”

  “Well,” said Francie, wonderfully cosy and sympathetic, “as a matter of fact, I do have one or two thoughts I’d like to share with you …”

  V

  “First of all,” said Francie briskly after I had begged her to continue, “you must get a divorce. No question about that. I know marriage is supposed to be for ever for clerical couples, but everything’s changed so much, hasn’t it, and nowadays a priest isn’t automatically washed up if his wife seeks a divorce—although of course the divorce has to be handled very discreetly with nothing sordid ever seeing the light of day. So you needn’t be terrified of wrecking Nick’s career, and as for his personal life … well, who knows? Maybe he’ll wind up falling madly in love with someone else.”

  “Oh God, if only he would! That would certainly let me off the hook, but apart from me the only woman he’s peculiar about is Alice, and I can’t see him ever wanting to—”

  “Alice?” said Francie so sharply that I jumped. “Alice? Alice Fletcher?”

  “Yes, they drool over the cat together, I don’t understand it, but I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with sex. So assuming there’s no hope at present of some gorgeous bimbo enslaving Nicky with a flick of her false eyelashes, how the hell do I drill it into his head that the marriage is completely finished?”

  “Have an affair,” suggested Franci
e—very creatively, I thought. After all, she was a regular churchgoer.

  “Good try,” I said with respect, “but I’ve done that. And when I confessed to him in Devon on Tuesday—”

  “You had an affair?” gasped Francie.

  “Well, actually I had three, but two were only one-night stands so they hardly count.”

  “One-night—”

  “Well, I had to do something, Francie! I was going mad with misery down there in Surrey!”

  “Oh darling, I’m not blaming you—heaven forbid I should ever be judgemental!” cried Francie, fighting back her enthralled expression and oozing empathy again from every pore. “But wasn’t Nick devastated when you confessed?”

  “Yes, but as the infidelity was all in the past and as he realised I’d never have been unfaithful if he hadn’t made me so miserable, he turned the other cheek and forgave me.”

  “God, that man’s so Christian!” said Francie fervently, but realised a second later that this statement was hardly compatible with last night’s catastrophe. At once she pulled herself together. “Sorry. Let me concentrate. You had these affairs, you said—but good heavens, how amazing, how did you do it? I mean, men do so like to take the lead, don’t they, and they tend to back off if a woman comes on too strong—”

  “I always chose much younger men and I took care to be either nannyish or schoolmistressy. They loved it.”

  “Good God!” said Francie stupefied.

  I decided it was time to haul the conversation back on course before she realised she was jealous. “Well, never mind all that,” I said rapidly. “Let’s focus on the main problem. How do I convince Nicky—”

  “Hang on,” said Francie suddenly. “You’ve just given me an idea. Supposing you have another affair, but this time you pick a lover who’ll underline to Nick that this isn’t just a spot of adultery which can be blown away by a gale of Christian forgiveness; it’s cast-iron proof that you can’t stay married to him because if you do you’d wreck his ministry.”